Today, make a list of your professional communication soft skills. If you Google “soft skills”, you arrive at 5-7 skill sets for which communication is deemed of utmost importance. These skills include: leadership, communication, ethics, flexibility, problem-solving, teamwork and interpersonal skills.
What additional skills would you add to this list, based on your professional experiences?
From my own perspective and experience, the common denominator which connects these professional soft skills is communication. In one way, or another, your words, actions and beliefs are broadcast loud and clear to everyone around you.
Regardless of whether people are physically or virtually connected to you. Or, whether you think you are not the primary person communicating. Because you are continuously communicating: consciously or unconsciously.
The quality of your professional communication soft skills reflect how you think about, interpret, report and act on what you observe.
First, how you think about issues, problems, challenges and innovation reflects your information resources.
Where do you get your information? Are your information resources reliable and easily validated? Do information resources reflect a singular point-of-view or multiple perspectives and approaches?
Consider that when information resources are biased, your professional communication soft skills reflect their bias. Are you comfortable offering provocative insights and interpretation to challenge colleagues and clients one millimeter beyond the mindset which keeps them comfortable?
Then, when you leverage your professional communication soft skills, do you depend exclusively on one communication platform?
Perhaps you are more comfortable making a traditional, verbal presentation in a lecture-type setting. To whom are you presenting? And, where are your listeners located: in the same room, virtually and live-streamed, via downloads on blogs and podcasts? If you also write, do you simply transcribe a lecture or do you modify content to challenge and engage readers?
Then, are you able to adapt insights into smaller, consumable bites for posting on social media sites? Each format style shifts how you translate your talk into your word into your message into your story.
Which platform(s) is most comfortable? Least comfortable? Why?
Also, professional communication soft skills are physical, even when no one can see you.
When colleagues and clients and followers read and hear what you have to say, they create a mental picture of who you are. This picture includes their expectations of your physical actions, formed by the intensity and urgency of your messaging, word choices and signature phrases. Even if this is not your intent, you do create a persona inside colleagues’ and clients’s brains.
If all you think you do is communicate via presentations, blogging and/or article writing, then you have a perceptual gap about yourself. Because professional communication soft skills create employee and customer experiences: about you and your unique mindset.
Time to bridge the gaps in your professional communication soft skills? Then take the next steps, Today.
- Planning your next corporate or association meeting? Engage me to present one of my Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs, workshops or moderated facilitation services. Contact me here.
- Download my new checklist and worksheet: Six Professional Development Targets to Hit each Month.
- Subscribe to my blog. Share your email address in the red box in the right column of this blog. Never miss another insightful post.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling Speaking Programs, Workshops and Facilitation Services leverage storytelling for STEM professionals and left brain thinkers to catalyze employee and customer success and retention. She motivates individuals and teams to combine courage, curiosity and critical thinking skills to co-create compelling stories which inspire trust in one another. Especially in industries with STEM and left-brain stakeholders.
Find out more about Babette’s professional story here. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of communication hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Babette’s speaker profile is on the espeakers platform. Contact Babette here.
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